


Only You

by DarlaBlack



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode: s07e05 Rush, Episode: s08e13 Per Manum, Episode: s11e03 Plus One, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-07
Updated: 2018-10-07
Packaged: 2019-07-27 17:23:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16223798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarlaBlack/pseuds/DarlaBlack
Summary: This is a variation on the bed conversation from “Plus One,” set post-"Rush" (with some references to the flashback sequence from "Per Manum"). Scully expresses some anxieties, and Mulder reassures her.





	Only You

“Maybe we’re too old,” he’d said. “Back in the day,” he’d sad.

She feels every minute of her almost thirty-six years. Knows the phrase  _advanced maternal age_  would apply to her now were it even possible for her to become pregnant. Which it is not. Does that make her an old maid? Her mother has stopped asking about her future, for which she is grateful.

Their life seems bound to be only this: the chase, the work, the occasional comfort of each other’s arms when time and affection allows. They are friends. They are sometimes lovers. They are hot and cold. They never (never but once, that awkward New-Year’s kiss) display their affection publicly.

“Come on, Mulder, let’s go.” She tugs at his arm, and they leave Tony Reed’s hospital room, enter the sterile hallway of scrubbed floors and mixed medicinal smells.

“You okay?” He asks at the elevator.

She shrugs, thinking of the way Chastity had eyed Mulder, of the way Max had done the same to her, but held his evaluation in the past tense. The insecurity is stupid, irrational, offensive to her feminist sensibilities. And yet…

She shakes her head. “Fine,” she says.

In the car he touches her knee; she startles to look at him. “Dinner?”

Ah, she thinks. It will be that kind of night. Hot, not cold. “I have food at my place,” she says. “We could throw something together?”

His fingers tighten over the fabric, draw a subtle circle on the inside of her lower thigh. “Okay.”

—

“Are we old, Mulder?”

They are stretched on her couch, her head in his lap while he runs his fingers through her hair.

“Why do you say that?”

She shrugs, hooking her fingers over his wrist, pulling it down to kiss his pulse point. The room smells of cinnamon from the lit candle on her coffee table. “I feel old,” she says.

“You’re not old.”

“Hmm.”

They returned from Pittsfield two hours ago to a hasty dinner and a bottle of wine, and now they are slow and sleepy. He moves his left hand to the waistband of her pants, tucking only the tips of his fingers under. She arches, just a bit, to let him know she likes it.

She sighs. “I’m not young either.”

He frowns, gives her hip a squeeze. “Scully,” he says. “What’s this about?”

She turns her face away, her body too, so she’s looking at his knees and his hand is on her ribs over her shirt. “What if you meet someone else?”

His muscles stiffen under her head. “What?”

It’s quiet for a moment as she thinks.

“Scully.”

“Hmm.”

“There’s no one else.”

Another sigh. “Not now.”

“Not ever.”

She’s quiet again.

“Hey.” He tugs her up, pulls her so she’s sitting across his lap, holds her face in his hands. “Not ever.”

“Mulder, what are we doing? What are we?” She can’t believe she’s said it aloud, voiced the rabid, gnawing question that’s been eating at her for months. Her face is hot with having spoken it and she feels she needs to redirect, reframe. “I mean what’s going to happen?”

“What’s going to happen when?”

“When we really are old. When we retire. When the Bureau finally kicks us out?”  _When there isn’t work_ , she wants to say.  _What will hold us together?_

“I’ll always be around, Scully.”

Around, she thinks. Calling her on the weekends, maybe. Showing up with beer and popcorn when he’s in the mood for more than monster hunting. “Just hanging out?”

“I’ll be wherever you want me,” he says. “I’m right here.”

“And what will we do?” She asks, shifting her weight on his lap, lifting her arms to his neck, leaning into him.

A low rumble of laughter in his chest, his hands moving freely now over her body. “We’ll think of something,” he murmurs. She dives in to catch his mouth, draws her tongue across his lips. He pulls her tight to him, devours her insecurities, smothers her in love so she cannot doubt.

—

Later, they are wrapped in her sheets and blankets, sweaty and soft, muscles loose. He places a kiss on her bare shoulder. “I’d marry you, you know,” he says into her skin.

Now it is her muscles that stiffen in surprise. “Mulder.” It’s a warning: don’t tease me. Don’t hurt me.

“I would,” he says.

“You don’t mean that.” She rolls to face him, heart beating fast, face pained with the fear of dashed hope.

He places a kiss to the crease between her eyebrows. “I would,” he says again, more forcefully. He holds her gaze firm. His face is so earnest she can’t stand it; she drops her head to his chest rubs her nose on the skin there, hot despite the coolness of the room. His arm comes around her, his palm heavy-warm on her back. Thumb dragging her scapula, he brushes his lips to the crown of her head. He waits for her, knowing she will come to tell him what’s wrong when she is ready. She does.

“Did you…” she says into his sternum. “Did you want it? As much as I did?”

It takes him a moment to understand and then his mouth drops open. His heart breaks again— _this_  is what she meant earlier. This is what plagues her about her age, about their unpromised time together. He thinks back to his fear at the beginning—of what it could have meant for them. He remembers how afraid he’d been that it might be like Emily: a sudden wedge, the desire to be close but no idea how to get there. But then she’d walked into the office the day after the procedure, and he’d looked at her and seen—something else. He’d seen the mother of his children. He’d known with absolute certainty that’s who she was. Who she’d always been. The feeling that had washed through him then was nothing like he’d ever known: fierce, urgent, all-consuming. Knowing that a small piece of him was inside her at that very moment had ripped open a future he’d not even dare imagine. He’d looked at her, and a smile had bloomed on his face—he’d loved her entirely in that moment: naked, blind, wild love. His Scully. His child. His family. He’d have thrown everything else away for them. All of it.

And the crushing ache, for them both, when it slipped away…

“Yes,” he says, lips still in her hair. “Scully, yes. I wanted it more than anything.”

She nods, forehead bobbing against his collarbone. “And now you’ll never have it.”

“Says who?”

She laughs, dry and bitter.

“Scully,” he whispers, fierce. “I told you not to give up.” He hooks a finger under her chin to lift it, places a gentle kiss on her lips.

“Mulder—“ her chin trembles.

“You want babies, Scully? We’ll get you babies.” She laughs again, this time through tears. He’s moved his hand to rub circles on her abdomen. Loving, forgiving, circles. Absolving.

“I do,” she says. “But it feels too late.”

He kisses her mouth again. “Never,” he says. “Is that why you’re worried, Scully? You think I’ll find someone else and have kids?”

She doesn’t have words. She nods, eyes on his chest in the dark. He’s shaking his head in disbelief, in denial. He scoops both arms around her then and rolls so he is on top of her, looking down into her face in the so dim light of streetlamps filtered through the half-cracked blinds. He uses that Oxford educated brain, sees what he couldn’t earlier—that she still worries about these things that have never even crossed his mind. He drags his hips against hers, feels himself begin to harden again. “It’s only you,” he says. “If we didn’t have work, I’d buy us a house and we could fill it with dogs and babies and whatever else you want.”

She’s laughing again, arching into him, rubbing her breasts against the fine hair on his abdomen and chest. “What about getting to the heart of a global conspiracy?”

“Mmm,” he groans, bites her neck, kisses down her collarbone. “Fuck ‘em.”

Her skin flushes pink, warms to hot under his touch, under his mouth. She moans, spreads her legs, hooks her ankles behind his back. He is all seriousness now as he finds her eyes again in the dim. “I wasn’t joking,” he tells her, quiet. “Babies or no babies, I’d marry you. There’s only you, Dana.”

Looking at his face, she believes him. She licks her lips. She nods. “There’s only you,” she whispers back.

When things grow cool again, as they always do, when they bicker, when he snaps at her or she at him, they remember this warmth. They find it again in the quiet of bedrooms and under the rustle of motel sheets. It never becomes untrue. It is the always-burning hearth at the center of them: only you. Only them. On her thirty-sixth birthday,  just a week after they have returned from California yet again, this time knowing the truth about Samantha, she catches him looking up egg donation, IVF again, adoption. Her eyes water and she shakes her head.

“It’ll happen,” he assures in a whisper, holding her to him.

And then one day, somehow, it does.


End file.
